Page History

...

"...as long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term...

Wiki Markup"The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or sup­pressed. The objective part is the sum total of what so ever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner 'state' in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous,---the cosmic times and places, for example,--whereas the inner state may be the most fu­gitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one. A conscious field +plus+ its object as felt or thought of +plus+ an attitude towards the object +plus+ the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs---such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract ele­ment of experience, such as the 'object' is when taken all alone. It is a +full+ fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the +kind+ to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the motor currents of the world run tilrough the like of it; it is on the line connecting real events with real events. That unshareable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up. \ [Footnote: Compare Lotze's doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the notion of a thing as it is 'in itself' is by conceiving it as it is +for+ itself, i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private sense of 'pinch' or inner activity of some sort going with it.\]

If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places,--they are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the descrip­tion-they being as describable as anything else-would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Reli­gion makes no such blunder....

...